Thanks to the Emerging Writers Network, the following is from an E-Panel of six literary translators who have made it possible for those of us reading in English to enjoy works from authors we otherwise would never have had the chance to enjoy:

Do you find it helps to know the author you are translating? Know their thought processes and beliefs?

Jordan Stump:

For the past ninety years or so, the prevailing belief among literary critics has been that the author has precious little to do, in the end, with the text. I strongly agree with that. And yet ... I always consult with the author as I'm translating, and I pay particular attention to his or her ideas about the effects the book is supposed to produce in th reader's mind, and to his or her "interpretation" of the book. Beyond that, I don't think it's all that vital to know the author's beliefs; it's the book itself that defines what the book is, and the translator should let the book be the book, more or less unaffected by things that we might know that aren't in the book.

Liz Henry:
Yes, absolutely. The more I know about the author, the better I feel my translations are. When I have to take some liberty with the work, then I trust myself more in deciding what direction to take it. For instance, in translating poems by Nestor Perlongher, I think I started with no knowledge of his life, and tried to extrapolate. I felt that I could see a lot of things that I later confirmed were true. When you are reading something written in a mixture of Spanish, Portuñol, French, and Portuguese, and thinking, "wait, is this poem actually about drag queens at a disco having oral sex, with weird references to French literary theory, or am I imagining it?" it is nice to have some outside confirmation of your suspicions.

I have also found this to be important in my translations of women poets from the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are things I don't know or can't know about their lives, but the more I know, the more I can grok what they're doing in the poems. I need to know biography, history, and the biographies and work of all the people *around* "my poet".

More here.